1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and an article of manufacture for writing on sequential storage media.
2. Description of the Related Art
A host computer system may write host data onto a storage medium located on a storage device. If the storage medium is a tape, then a tape drive may append a trailer record at the end of the host data on the tape. The trailer record represents the end of host data on the tape. On successive appends of host data to the tape, the tape drive overwrites the existing trailer record and appends a new trailer record at the end of the appended host data.
Storage media that exhibit write-once/read-many (WORM) behavior can be written to only once but can be read a plurality of times. Data on WORM storage media is not subject to alteration and therefore is stored more reliably when compared to data stored in non-WORM storage media. WORM storage media may be useful for many applications, such as, logs and journals. Optical disks are a commonly used WORM media. Optical disks achieve WORM behavior because the writing process on optical disks is permanent in nature, i.e., once data is physically written on an optical disk the data cannot be erased.
Notwithstanding the use of WORM storage media and the use of trailer records for writing on storage media there is a need in the art for improved techniques for writing on storage media.